amusing. Disappointing in the first case as well as whe is a pretty good one.

DSK would never have made that mistake but then, he's got other problems (and I'm not talking about his New York maid problems)...

Next year will be interesting indeed, suspect a lot of movement in advance of elections, as economists on left (well, our left) and right (borrowing heavily from Front de Gauche economists, this is probably woth a diary) both see the Euro for what it is, a hard shackle against growth, stablity and social equality around all of the EU save a couple of countries in the center (and I can only think of three or four...DE, NL, AT and LU).

If France detaches as well from the interested center of the Eurozone...well, then all things become possible.

The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet.
Winston Churchill

Back in January (of 2011), DSK was being interviewed by a BBC Radio journalist in the context of a documentary on the history of the IMF.[1] Toward the end of the program, I heard the distinctive voice of DSK responding to a journalist's question about how the global economy ought to be reconfigured in the aftermath of the 2008 Crisis. His astonishing answer was:

"Never in the past has an institution like the IMF been as necessary as it has been today... Keynes, sixty years ago, already foresaw what was needed; but it was too early. Now is the time to do it. And I think we are ready to do it!"

This was, in my estimation, a bombshell of a programmatic statement by the IMF's Managing Director. What was he referring to? He was, of course, referring to Keynes' powerfully put argument (in the context of the 1944 Bretton Woods conference) that a system of fixed exchange rates cannot survive for long without an automated mechanism that treats (a) systematic trade surpluses and (b) systematic trade deficits as the different sides of a problematic coin.

Was more thinking what he would do as PM of France. Not optimistic about that given the constraints Germany would put on him.

As IMF head, no debate from me, better than what we had, better than what we have. Still not an ideal institution though, have spent most of their institutional life destroying economies with their "advice" and their "ultimatums" relative to the aid they mete out.

The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet.
Winston Churchill